Obama labor secretary says she still has “great concerns” about construction-worker safety in Texas

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said today that Texas has made progress on construction-worker safety but needs to do more to improve workplace protections amid its recent spurt of job creation.

“I have spent some time out in Texas,” Solis told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast, “and there are some great concerns I have with respect to worker protection.”

The Labor Department put more feet on the ground in Texas after noticing that the state had suffered “a large number” of fatalities and injuries among construction workers a couple of years ago, she said. Solis said she held a work-safety summit in Texas in 2010 in light of the statistics.

“It struck me that there’s a lot of need in the state of Texas,” Solis said. “That doesn’t even address the educational issues.”

Solis, a former Democratic congresswoman from California, said her comments “aren’t directed at any individual,” such as the Texas governor, who is running for the Republican nomination for president in 2012.

Texas officials, including Gov. Rick Perry, have been highly critical of the federal government’s regulatory reach during the Obama administration. But Solis said efforts to target construction accidents in Texas had improved worker safety in the Lone Star State.

“So to me it’s not a negative,” she said. “We’re helping to improve— we’re not trying to get in the way.”

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimated that nearly half of net new U.S. jobs from June 2009 to June 2011—in other words, since the official end of the recession—were created in Texas. Perry has attributed his state’s job-creation record to a low-tax, low-regulatory environment, and he has made note of it in his presidential campaign.

Solis said the state’s growing oil industry and lower pay scale are two factors that have helped promote job creation in the Lone Star State. But she declined to discuss what role Perry may have played in Texas’ job-creation record.